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The first naturalist to observe the Sea Otter in its native habitat was Georg Wilhelm Steller, who visited the Kamchatka Peninsula with Vitus Bering in the mid-Eighteenth Century. Steller's field notes reflect the awe these amazing creatures would stir in many generations of naturalists to come.

"They embrace their young with an affection that is scarcely credible," Steller noted.

Of course there were soon other Western travellers to the Northwest Pacific Coast whose designs upon the Sea Otter were deadly.

Now that is a poem I can enjoy to read over and over, like the sea otters rolling over and over after they eat. They are such beautiful creatures. Their little faces remind me of the ground hog that pops his head up across the road from where I live.

It is fortunate for the ground hog that it does not have the densest fur of all creatures, for it is that gift that caused the sea otter to become the object of the mass hunting that brought the species very near to extinction.

In the late eighteenth century, traders who brought sea otter skins to market in Canton could get $100 apiece for them. To Chinese mandarins, sea otter coats were the ultimate in fashionable gear, and they were willing to pay, and of course where there is demand there is going to be supply. Traders from Boston risked sailing around the Horn to get the precious skins. To them it was a great business opportunity, Yankee ingenuity at work. They tricked the Northwest Coast natives into overhunting these sacred animals and selling off the skins for a few bits of copper, a button or a nail, which the Indians desired for use as gifts in their potlatch ritual. It is the saddest of stories.